The question isn’t where do you start with Tom Stipe, it’s where do you stop? He writes songs, jingles, and radio and television spots. He’s been the engineer/producer for U.S. Open Tennis, U.S. Open Golf, Super Bowls, the Olympics, Major League Baseball and the World Cup. And for forty years he’s served as a writer and producer for the Crimson Tide Sports Network. Tom is an obvious candidate for the Alabama Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.

“I think this induction just means that I’m old,” quips Stipe. “ Here’s the truth of it. The guy that inspired me to even get in the business is himself a Hall of Famer. The radio station where I worked was owned by a Hall of Famer. A  couple of my best friends, with whom I owned a radio station later in life, are both Hall of Famers. The gentleman that was doing the news there is a Hall of Famer.”

“I’ve been lucky enough on the Bama network to work with John Forney, Doug Layton, Eli Gold, and Kenny Stabler – all Hall of Famers.  I’m just in the right place at the right time. I’ll just call it dumb luck.”

“Oh, yeah, he would say that” smiles Tom Roberts, retired director of broadcasting for Crimson Tide Sports.  “But if you were to see him in action – especially on a football game day – he’s going to be in the stadium ready to go by 9:30 or 10 even though the kickoff is at 2:30. And he’s not going to leave until a couple of hours after the game. It’s a long day, but he handles it flawlessly.”

Stipe went to work at the University of Alabama to run an in-house news bureau and ad agency.  Paul Kennedy, the Voice of the Crimson Tide at that time, asked him to help with some technical problems on the broadcast side. The president of the university also asked Snipe to consider working with the university’s sport broadcasts.

“I had several connections to it, but really I got involved at the behest of the president of the university and the Voice of the Tide,” explains Stipe. “I sort of fell in love with sports radio earlier in life. So, to be sitting on the 50 or sitting courtside with a number of my closest friends watching my school’s team play? Doing something you love for a school that you love and doing it with your friends and getting paid to do it?  That’s pretty good.  I loved it.”

“He’s just a very intelligent guy and he has a good grasp of Alabama athletic history,” says Roberts.  “And he truly is a wordsmith. Neither Eli nor I give him nearly the credit that he deserves. A lot of times when Eli would come out with a really good line at the end of the game – it’s because Tom was in his ear telling him what he should say!”

“I like to write. I write a lot of stuff for the Bama show,” Stipe says. “You know you don’t have the ability to show pictures in radio. You have to tell them. You have to describe it. And it’s more than just words. It’s more than just what the announcer says. It’s the sounds that you hear. It’s the popping of the pads or the swishing of the basketball through the net that all sort of plays into it.”

“To me, the most significant thing about Tom is the number of games that he has seen,” says Roberts. “It’s about 600 in football and 1200 or so in basketball and that’s a pretty amazing number. I don’t think any sports broadcaster that I know of has ever seen that many basketball games.”

Stipe isn’t quite as busy as he used to be, but his schedule is still full to overflowing.

“I do all Alabama football and basketball games. I still did some golf up until last year. I do tennis  whenever it comes along,” Stipe says. “I’m lucky to have flexibility, but the Bama schedule alone is a heavy schedule. There are 40 talk shows, 30 some odd basketball games, 13, 14, or 15 football games … it’s a good bit of work. But it’s a labor of love with people that I dearly love, and it’s my team.”